This past month hasn't allowed me as much time as I would like to dedicate to Avaloria but never the less I have been working on it. Lately I have been trying to flesh out a lot of the beginning quests and tutorials so that I can hopefully have an open alpha testing period by the end of April. In doing so I have been expanding the quest objective parser to allow for different types of quests. Along with this has been the creation of named enemy npcs. These are merely specialized mob classes on the backend that have some different functions and flags. These enemy npcs are going to be very interactive, talking to you, talking to themselves, roaming around and interacting with the game world and other mobs around them. In creating these I needed the ability to reanimate them after death so that I wasn't constantly re-creating the object anytime someone killed it.
These enemy npc objects also have the ability to store dialogue's on them. These dialogues are merely dictionaries with keyword keys, and dialogue values. This will facilitate player interaction with said npcs and allow for trigger events to cause the npc to talk. So perhaps if you walk into a room with a named npc, he or she may taunt you. They may say mean things if you flee from them. All of this is based off hooks used in the underlying evennia server.
All the mobs in the game have ratings that dictate their general difficulty: average, strong, hero, demi-god and God. The general idea is that most mobs in the world will be average rating or strong. Most of the quest npcs will be of hero rating and only bosses in large dungeons will be of demi-god rating. The god rating will only be used for the actual deities in game or their aspects. These will be incredibly tough enemies that will not be able to be soloed.
This is just a brief behind the scenes look at the enemies and npcs in avaloria. In the end, the encounters and enemies in avaloria will be varied and quite colorful indeed.
